Software to organize and track your exercises

Question

I am math teacher in secondary school and I have a few thousands of mathematical exercises in many Microsoft Word files.

I tried to organize them in folders and keep track of new exercises to update my content, but it was hard working with many different type of exercices. I was thinking to create a web app for personal use where I could add all the exercises and also implement a query system to retrieve only those I want to create exams papers with specific difficulty or specific chapter. But, I had a problem with exercises with tables, bullets and not just simple text and math symbols.

I am looking for a software which help you to organize and categorize all your exercises and make your life as a teacher easier.

Edit: I am looking a software to organize the exercises and not the documents. For example, in the web app I tried to create, I had to import the exercises one by one including meta-tags like difficulty, tags, chapters, images etc. With that way, I could run a query to retrieve all the exercises with specific tag or difficulty.

Cross-posted to Academia and Math Educators. Simultaneous cross-posts are against Stack Exchange policy because they fragment answers and waste people's time when they write an answer to a question that's already been answered somewhere else. — David Richerby, Sep 10 '14 at 20:47
This may sound asinine, but have you tried notecards? The old "card catalog" concept can very efficient for organizing things made by just one person. — Alexander Gruber, Sep 16 '14 at 05:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 13 '14 at 16:58

Word? Yuck.

Ultimately you need a document management system, each exercise has to become it's own file, although you can cheat and put multiple similar exercises in the same file, then each exercise is assigned keywords.

You could do this with screen snapshot software and a good photo cataloging package.

Adjust word settings so that the full path to the file shows on screen.
Take a snap of each exercise.
Catalog the resultant images. You can uses faceted keywords to make later search easier. E.g. Diff:Hard allows you to find the hard problems without finding the ones that otherwise use the word hard. Top:DifEq could stand for topic differential equations. Cor:Math211 could stand for what math course(s) you used it for, and so on.

Software to organize and track your exercises

1 Answers1